Gareth Polmeer studied at the Royal College of Art (RCA) and Central Saint Martins. He has exhibited works nationally and internationally, holds a doctorate from the RCA and has published on moving image, digital aesthetics and philosophy, presenting papers at conferences and symposia.

He has worked as a university lecturer for 10 years across Fine Art, Moving Image and Design subjects (both theory and practice) and is currently a lecturer at the RCA (Critical and Historical Studies, since 2011) and at Camberwell College of Arts (Visual Theory, since 2009). Exhibitions in recent years include 'Contact: A Festival of New Experimental Film and Video' at Apiary Studios, and ‘Building Structures’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK), ‘Four Modes of Anti-Image’ at the State Hermitage Museum (Russia), and ‘Durational Video’ at Northwest Film Forum (USA).

As a writer his interests encompass digital aesthetics, film, art history and the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. Recent/forthcoming papers on Hegel at University College London, Kings College London, and the British Computer Society.

Qualifications

BA(Hons), MA, PhD(RCA), PGCert(HE), FHEA

Current Employment

Royal College of Art, UK
Visiting Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies.
PhD supervisor in Critical and Historical Studies. MA dissertation supervisor for postgraduate programmes in Visual Communication, Animation and Information Experience Design.

London College of Communication, UK
Guest Lecturer in Film and Television

Writing

Books (in development)

The Movement of Appearance: Aesthetics and Eternity - A study of time and eternity in Hegel's philosophy, considered across connections in speculative logic and the lectures on fine art. The book is a contemporary review of Hegelian aesthetics, and a critique of postmodernism and its legacies in the contemporary philosophy of art.

Activity and Return - The book examines a number of cultural, economic and political debates in Hegel's philosophy, relating this to contemporary contexts, time and the notion of sublation.

'...Gareth Polmeer’s Sea (2011) and Field Variation (2014), where the image in each case is comprised of numerous woven bands of video’s scan lines, derived from separate video recordings of a seascape or landscape... motion is a product of the systematic processes of the work, not a matter of the ordinary given mode of representation.'

'…physical optics is explicitly rooted in frame-based and structural film…it overwhelmingly asserts the non-persistence of vision, or the ineluctable flow and ungraspable substance of the screened image. Like all critical cinema, it carries the negative in its definition… Gareth Polmeer’s Sea (2011), which he describes as based on ‘progressions’, shifting vertical digital lines of seascape horizons in iterations of 1/25 of a second “to recompose the image” as waves seem to roll over or between different parts of the picture. Here, “continuous motion is induced from a series of stills” in which “the image refreshes sequentially”. Paradoxes of motion and space are induced through the image in process...'

[Field/Variation (2014)] ‘…on a spatial/compositional level, the work is a kind of collage, in which an image is cut into very thin horizontal layers, which are reassembled into a different order. This same process also takes place in the temporal dimension, so that the lines from different moments in time are also displaced and repositioned. Spatial inversion and temporal reversal further remove the constituent lines from their original place and function, to create a mirror-formed loop, a mirror within a mirror… the work isolates and foregrounds the presentational form of the video image as compounded from lines. In cathode ray TVs, the image is scanned onto the screen in a series of left to right, top to bottom lines. In other words it is inherently linear. In modern flat screens and projectors, the pixels are always ‘on’, and their brightness is controlled by the rapid variation in the voltages applied to them, in order to change the composition of the image over time, i.e. to generate an apparently moving image…Polmeer’s piece turns more on the incipient abstractness of all images, but crucially extending this into an effect of temporal manipulation proper to time based images.’

Chris Welsby. Artist/Filmmaker

‘[Sea (2011) is]…a way to mess with the digital image so that it is no longer separate from, and therefore looking in upon the landscape from outside…a sort of hybrid…where neither element can be separated…where representation and represented meet...Where does the working of the perceptual eye/brain mechanism stop and the photo-electric signal on the monitor start.'